


who manifest their presences by shadows

by MaryPSue



Category: Crimson Peak (2015)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Future Fic, Gen, Past Character Death, Reincarnation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-09
Updated: 2020-02-09
Packaged: 2021-02-28 03:53:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,430
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22637926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaryPSue/pseuds/MaryPSue
Summary: The grin Tom turned on her, this time, at least seemed to be deliberately unsettling. “Oh, has no one told you?” He pushed one of the foaming glasses the bartender set down before him towards Laura, raising the other to her in a mocking toast. “Your inheritance is haunted.”
Comments: 6
Kudos: 21





	who manifest their presences by shadows

**Author's Note:**

> This is just a short...experiment? Proof of concept? I challenged myself to write a take on some of the most popular fic tropes for Crimson Peak, just for fun. This one's 'OFC descendant of Edith and Thomas'. If I were to expand it to a full-length fic, it would involve ghosts (obviously), reincarnation and/or reincarnation-adjacent nonsense, and Laura (the OFC) finding Edith's novel and realising the past is trying to repeat itself, with some interesting and unexpected results.
> 
> The title comes from Angela Carter's short story 'The Lady of the House of Love'.

It all started when Laura’s grandmother died.

They hadn’t exactly been close, but Grandmother Thomasina had been a lot closer to Laura than she had been to anyone else. Her husband had died before Laura was born, and she had no siblings. And Laura had been the only one who’d had any time for Grandmother Thomasina’s ghost stories.

Still, it came as a surprise to everyone when the will came out and they learned that, first, Grandmother Thomasina had owned a huge estate somewhere in England, and second, that she’d left it all to Laura.

Laura’s father advised her to just sell it all. It was a sizeable chunk of land. It likely would’ve taken care of her tuition. It was good advice. She should have taken it.

But somehow, Laura couldn’t bring herself to let Allerdale Hall go without ever seeing it for herself.

She wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t like the place had any particular meaning to her family, considering that most of them hadn’t even known it existed. Apparently Grandmother Thomasina had inherited it from her mother, who’d got it from her dead first husband – Thomasina’s namesake – and nobody’d been back to see it since he died. It sounded like there’d been some kind of scandal, maybe – he’d died pretty young. Or maybe after he died, the place had just held too many painful memories.

Either way, by all accounts, it sounded like kind of a dump. The title was not very descriptive, but Thomasina’s will called the estate ‘bleak’, and the hall itself had apparently had a hole in the roof and already been sinking when Great-Grandmother Edith had left, over a hundred years earlier. Laura wasn’t sure how a house could sink. But Grandmother Thomasina had always been prone to embellishment and artistic license, and according to her, Great-Grandmother Edith had been a writer. Between the two of them, Laura was pretty sure it was a metaphor. Somebody had read _The Fall of the House of Usher_ one time too many.

Still, even if she got there and found nothing but a falling-down graffitied wreck in the middle of nowhere, Laura wanted to see it. There was something terribly romantic about the whole thing, about the idea of suddenly discovering she was the lady of a mysterious crumbling manor somewhere in a country she’d never seen. About how both Great-Grandmother Edith and Grandmother Thomasina had apparently kept it secret all these years. About the aura of mystery surrounding Great-Grandmother Edith’s never-spoken-of first husband.

So Laura had packed her bags, booked her flights, and, within a week, was face to face with what remained of Allerdale Hall.

There wasn’t much to come face to face with. Coming up the long drive, under the black wrought-iron arch and handful of tumbled bricks that apparently had once served as a gate, the place looked imposing and impressive up on the peak of the hill, all Gothic arches and jagged peaked roofs. Its empty windows struck Laura as staring eyes, taking in her approach. She knew it was just her imagination, but she couldn’t help but feel a cold dislike in that inanimate gaze.

But when Laura pulled the rented Range Rover up before the ruin, she saw two things in quick succession. One, why the locals had all called the place ‘Crimson Peak’. And two, what Grandmother Thomasina had meant by ‘sinking’.

It was no metaphor. Elaborate, lacy brick railings stood half-buried in the raw red ground as though growing up through it, little more than six inches showing above the earth. They partitioned off a wide, flat space around the door. Laura’s best guess was that the railing had once delineated a patio or drive that was now somewhere under the sucking red clay that clung to her boots. She was never going to be able to get it off, she could already tell.

The door itself might once have had stairs leading up to it, but now was packed close between the jutting brick constructions to either side of it with red earth. It stuck, badly, partly because it was sunk nearly a foot, if Laura had to guess, down into the clay. She could get it to jerk inward, in fits and starts, but something – maybe the dirt she’d displaced on the other side – always seemed to force it sharply closed again. Laura finally managed to force it just wide enough for her to sneak through, putting her shoulder against one ornately-decorated door and pushing with all her strength, her boots sliding in the dirt. And that was when she saw the third thing.

Allerdale Hall was gone.

The wind, howling through the shattered windows on either side of the short entryway, caught Laura’s hair and gave it a playful toss as she crossed the clay-drowned floor. She didn’t take more than five steps before she reached the crumbling remains of a stair, and stopped, staring out at the hilltop opening out before her.

The face of Allerdale Hall, so imposing and solid-looking as Laura had approached, was nothing but a hollowed-out shell. At the end of the entryway, the walls terminated abruptly in broken brick and torn wood, and where there should have been hallways and rooms and ceilings, there was only red earth and blue sky. Only a few hardy yellow grasses were struggling to grow over the vast, pitted red stain on the hilltop where the body of the manor should have been. A few jutting timbers, and the remnants of stone arches rising out of the clay like broken ribs, were the only sign that there had ever been a building there.

The sight filled Laura with an unexpected and unnamable emotion, somewhere between grief and triumph. At least now she didn’t have to feel bad about selling it and having someone knock it all down. But there was still something melancholy about those few pathetic, sinking pieces of debris. And Laura couldn’t help but feel like she’d just lost her last link to Grandmother Thomasina and her mother before her, the last thread binding her to them unravelling. As soon as she’d seen the jagged peaks of its roof, stark and black against the pale sky, Laura had known that this was the haunted house from every one of the ghost stories Grandmother Thomasina had always sworn _her_ mother had told her were true. After Laura had come all this way, after all those long years – none of her family would ever see it now.

She wasn’t going to find any answers here. Allerdale Hall and the past would keep their secrets.

 _And,_ she wasn’t going to be able to stay in the manor house. It was probably a good thing, Laura decided, that she’d booked a room at the bed and breakfast in the village.

It took her less time to find her way back to the village than it had taken her to get out to the estate. She’d gotten lost three times on her way out, having to turn back and retrace her path more than once. For some reason, the locals had seemed reluctant to give her any specific directions. And they all relied on local landmarks, which Laura guessed made sense, but didn’t help a foreigner find her way around. Especially when she wasn’t used to driving on the left side of the road.

Laura stopped in the pub that night for dinner, deciding to give real English fish and chips a try. She wasn’t sure that what she got was real English fish and chips, though. The chips were hot but greasy, the fish a lurking whitish, pasty smear inside a proud – and nearly inch-thick – casing of batter. Laura couldn’t say she was impressed. At least the beer was decent.

“Excuse me. I couldn’t help but notice – you’ve been up to Crimson Peak, haven’t you?”

Laura looked over to the barstool beside her, and into a pair of the most intense blue eyes she’d ever seen. They belonged to a man who could, in fact, be accurately described as tall, dark, and extremely handsome. Laura hastily downed a mouthful of the adequate beer to cover her sputtering. “How -”

The man nodded towards her feet with a crooked grin. “Oh, I suppose I must be Sherlock Holmes.”

Laura looked down, saw the red clay caked on her boots and spattered up her jeans. She laughed, partly with relief. The hilltop was so open, and she hadn’t seen anyone else there. The idea of anybody – even this admittedly very magnetic guy – watching her up there, unseen, had left her feeling exposed and uneasy. “God, I’m never going to get these clean.”

The guy’s gaze really was intense, even over that charming, crooked smile. “American! Would you credit that. What brings you all the way out to our humble little village?” He canted his head a little to one side, his eyes narrowing as he said, “Please tell me you haven’t a camera crew in tow. It’s dangerous up on the peak – the ruin’s not stable. And I know television people have no fear for their lives. We can’t afford the lawsuit if someone with a camera decides they need to stand where the house was to get a shot and falls through to the basement, or if the façade comes down and crushes some poor sod.”

He seemed to noticed Laura’s uneasy glance down at her boots, because he grinned and winked. “And, the last time one of those ghost-investigation shows did an episode on Crimson Peak, it was near four years before you could walk down the high street without being stopped by some big-eyed American wanting to hear horrible tales about the clay spitting up skellies.”

Laura nearly snorted beer through her nose. There was a confused moment as she tried to fix her face without blowing snot all across the bar, a moment that ended with a broad, solid hand pressed gently against her back and another offering her a napkin. Laura took it, blew her nose, and then looked up. The guy’s eyes were even more arresting up close.

She couldn’t think of any reason to lie. “My grandmother just died. Apparently she owned Allerdale Hall. And she left it to me.”

The guy’s expression didn’t change. Actually, it was a little unsettling how much it didn’t change. Sometimes, the satellite on Laura’s TV would flicker and the image would freeze while the sound continued on, until suddenly the frozen image would fragment into movement again, briefly warping the image into the shape of whatever was moving before the screen righted itself. For the briefest of moments, Laura got the same sense looking at the guy’s face. Like it had frozen in place while something else went on behind it, some flicker of dark motion just visible behind his eyes.

And then he smiled, wide and inviting, and the raucous good cheer of the pub flowed back in, warming the air between them. “So you’re the lady of the manor now, is that so?” He stuck out a hand, but there was a twinkle in his eye that belied the formality of the gesture. “I suppose that makes you my boss. Tom Latimer. I look after the place.”

“Some place,” Laura said. “Laura. Laura Price.”

She took his hand and shook, firmly. Tom had a solid, reassuring grip, but his hand was curiously cool under Laura’s. She wondered if he’d just come in from outside.

“Laura,” Tom said, consideringly. And then, “Buy you a drink?”

“Please,” Laura said, hopefully not too fast.

She waited until Tom had ordered two more beers before asking, as casually as she could manage, “So what were you saying about Americans with camera crews and ghost shows?”

The grin Tom turned on her, this time, at least seemed to be deliberately unsettling. “Oh, has no one told you?” He pushed one of the foaming glasses the bartender set down before him towards Laura, raising the other to her in a mocking toast. “Your inheritance is haunted.”

…

_Two days later_

…

Somehow, the ruin of Allerdale Hall was even more unsettling at night.

Laura pulled the Range Rover in behind what remained of the gate and killed the engine. She’d shut off the headlights before she’d even turned onto the drive, inching through the moonlit dark with her eyes wide for any sign of anything living that might choose to dart into her path.

If there really was someone up there, she didn’t want them to know she was coming.

Laura tucked her flashlight – Tom had called it a ‘torch’, something Laura found unaccountably funny – into the pocket of her windbreaker, just in case, before she slipped down out of the Range Rover. She shut the door as quietly as she could behind her. But she shouldn’t have worried. The wind caught her almost as soon as she opened the door, tearing at her hair like it wanted to pull the blonde locks out of their messy braid and flipping her windbreaker’s hood up over her face. The ghastly howling it made as it swept across the hilltop was loud enough to drown out even the noisy metallic _chunk_ of the door falling into place.

It was a long, dark, eerie walk from the gate up to what was left of the house. The clay stuck to Laura’s boots, clumping up on the soles and making it hard to walk. But when she tried to step off the road, the overgrown yellow grass seemed to tangle around her ankles and try to trip her up, dry, sharp blades jabbing her through her jeans. The wind battered and buffeted at her the whole way, swirling around her to slam into her first from one side, then the other, rattling her windbreaker’s hood against her ears.

Now and then, that rattle and the sighing and whispering of the wind in the grass combined to sound like human voices, somewhere in the distance. No less than three times, Laura spun around, half-convinced someone had just breathed her own name into her ear.

“No wonder people think this place is haunted,” she muttered, hugging her arms more firmly around herself, her hands tucked under her arms. She almost wished she’d thought to bring gloves.

Laura was about halfway up the drive when she saw it. Way up in one of the remaining peaks, in a tiny, pointed window stuffed under an eave, the briefest flicker of an underwater blue-green light shone, before disappearing as quickly and unexpectedly as it had appeared. It was gone so quickly that Laura wasn’t sure, for a moment, if she’d seen it at all.

She turned, looking back over her shoulder, but there was no sign of headlights retreating down the road behind her that might have glanced off the window. Besides, the angles were all wrong – even if there were glass left in the window for headlights to reflect off of, what was left of the house was much too far back from the road for the light to reach it.

Which meant that the light had to have come from behind the window. That, somehow, even though the whole building behind that forbidding façade was gone…someone was up there.

Laura quickened her pace.

The hollowed-out face of Allerdale Hall loomed above her, as dark and dead as a tombstone, heavy and oppressive, as she passed between the half-sunk railings and up to the door. The thick brick constructs – balustrades? Bollards? – on either side of the door turned the entry, in the dimness, into a gaping black mouth, opened wide to swallow her. Laura paused a moment before passing between them, feet slowly sinking, listening hard. But if anyone had been moving around, she wouldn’t have heard them anyway, not over the wind.

Laura just didn’t want to admit to herself how much she didn’t want to open that door.

Maybe she should have just called Tom. Asked him to come with her. Asked him to go _for_ her. He likely would’ve been glad to – to watch the silly American wet her pants in terror of the wind and the occasional bat or sparrow, jumping at imagined ghosts. The unkind thought crossed her mind that he might even be happy to see how poorly she, the supposed lady of the manor, handled the house he was so familiar with, that had been his responsibility since long before Laura even knew it existed, that he had no fear of, that held no mystery for him. And, standing out in the middle of nowhere, with the cold wind blowing through her and playing tricks on her ears, far from anyone who might hear if she screamed, alone in the dark, Laura couldn’t deny that even if he were laughing at her, just his presence would’ve been reassuring in a way she couldn’t resist.

But there was…something. Something about his laugh when he’d been telling her stories about things people said they’d seen up on Crimson Peak. Something about how reluctant he’d been to give over the keys. Something about the way something behind his eyes seemed to flicker whenever Laura mentioned her ownership of Allerdale Hall –

No. Bringing Tom would have been a mistake. Laura had to come here alone.

She had to see for herself.

Bracing her quivering heart against that thought, Laura plunged into the shadows surrounding the door. She braced her feet as best she could against the clay, and put her shoulder against the door.

She was expecting a struggle, like it had been that first afternoon she’d visited the hall. But the door swung open so smoothly that Laura, really putting her back into it, overbalanced and fell, face-first, over the threshold.

She was expecting to land with an embarrassing and hideously messy _splat_ right in a puddle of red clay mud. She was not expecting her shins to slam into and her chin to bounce off of hardwood.

Laura lay stunned for a moment, before gingerly pushing herself up. The wood – definitely wood, polished to a satin finish under her fingers, with clay oozing coldly up between the narrow boards everywhere she put her weight – stayed solid under her. She scrabbled in her pocket for her flashlight, giving up any pretense of stealth. If there was really someone here, her thumping arrival would’ve already announced her presence. No use in trying to be sneaky after she’d already yelled ‘FUCK! OW!’ at the top of her lungs.

She did pause for a moment in the dark, listening with bated breath for any sound of movement, and realized something strange. The wind, still moaning, seemed curiously muffled and distant. Almost like – almost like there were walls between it and Laura.

But that was impossible. Because Allerdale Hall was –

Laura clicked on her ‘torch’, and froze.

The flashlight’s beam revealed, in bits and pieces as she swept it back and forth, not only the beautiful, decaying inlay of the floor she lay on, but the elaborate Gothic carving of the stairs that wrapped around and down three floors in front of her before coming to an end a few feet from where she’d fallen, the narrow walls of the entryway opening out into a vast, high-ceilinged hall, rooms upon rooms opening out underneath and behind the stair, going so far back that Laura’s flashlight beam petered out before it could reach the far wall…

There was no other explanation. She was inside Allerdale Hall.

It couldn’t be here. It _wasn’t_ here. Laura had seen the bare red stain on the hilltop where the body of Allerdale Hall had stood with her own eyes, not three days before. Had stood in this very spot, her feet mired in clay, and looked out at the pale grey sky, felt the wind, sweeping unimpeded over the moors, tangle her hair and clutch at her clothes. Had seen the last remains of the wreck, had seen the half-buried and broken shards of some of the arches and carvings that her flashlight beam now illuminated, whole and standing, set neatly and firmly into the walls as though they had never been anywhere else.

And everywhere the circle of yellowish light landed, it revealed only more encroaching, cobwebbed opulence. Everything was sleepily, patiently still and muffled with dust, frozen in the curious neglected way of something disused but sealed away. Like a time capsule. Or the pictures Laura had seen online of a Parisian apartment locked up in the twenties and forgotten, untouched, until the early aughts. From the heavy, pointed arches of the stair railings, broken away on the balcony above her, to the flaking gilding on the ornate frames of the portraits covering the walls, to the heavy, moth-eaten draperies that delineated rooms to her right and –

Laura leapt to her feet, flashlight sweeping wildly over the drapery-hung doorway to her right, heart pounding in her throat. The beam illuminated nothing but the soft dullness of velvet trimmed with dark golden tassels, glistening off the slow drip of clay bleeding down the walls, but she knew.

She’d seen movement.

When the impossible hall remained stonily silent and still, Laura managed to calm her jangling nerves enough to call out. “Hello?”

She’d half-expected the sound to bounce back to her from the vastness of the hall, but instead, the wide, empty space seemed to have a curious muffling effect. Almost like Allerdale was swallowing her voice whole.

As she’d expected, she didn’t get an answer. Laura took one ginger step forward, holding the flashlight in front of her with both hands like a sword. Something slithered coldly between her fingers, and Laura looked down to see that her palms were dripping red with clay from where she’d pushed herself up off the floor. In the dimness, her hands looked bloody.

She took another step forward, the floorboards squishing and oozing under her feet, and then, feeling braver, another. “Is anybody there?”

No answer. In the slowly-sweeping beam of the flashlight, nothing stirred except drifting particles of dust – and the flashing wings of a huge grey moth, startled off a wall and startling Laura almost right back out the door.

She laughed at herself, as the moth’s rustling wings retreated into the depths of the impossible hall. That must have been all she’d seen. Just a moth, or some other wild creature, startled by the light.

Still, though, Laura couldn’t quiet the nagging thought that what she’d seen moving had been, for a single instant, unmistakably a person.

She crept across the entry and up the shallow steps into the main hall, still waving her flashlight from side to side, looking all around her as she went. This place couldn’t be real. A building couldn’t just disappear in the daytime and reconstruct itself under the moonlight. And yet, when she looked up, Laura could see, storeys above her, the narrow sickle-blade sliver of the moon peeking down through the shattered timbers of Allerdale Hall’s roof.

As if in response to Laura’s thought, a horrible, shuddering, wailing moan seemed to fill the gaping darkness of the hall like the sound of an enormous, diabolical pipe organ. It rose like some infernal crescendo, somehow at once both inexpressibly sad and hollow with menace, went on and on and _on_ and then, just as unexpectedly as it had begun, died gradually away.

But in the quiet that sound left in its wake, Laura could hear another sound emanating from out of the vast darkness before her. One that hadn’t been there before the cry.

It was faint, just on the very edge of hearing. But it was, unmistakably, the sound of someone playing a piano.

Laura stood frozen in place, no more able to turn around and break for the door than she was to take another step towards the source of that eerie, melancholy sound. It was a pretty tune, if a little sad, and it sounded like it was being played by an expert and experienced hand, one that knew the rises and falls of the song like its own heartbeat.

No matter how many times Laura passed her flashlight over the dark space reaching back under the stairs, she could see neither piano nor player.

“You can’t scare me,” Laura called into the dark, at last, when the relentless soft chime of the music became nearly unbearable, sounding braver than she felt. She hoped, to the tips of her toes, that she was telling the truth. With every word that fell from her lips, though, with every ringing, real sound of her voice in the howling quiet, she felt a little flame of anger flicker in her breastbone, its heat making her bolder. She thought of Tom’s crooked smile, thought again of his reluctance to hand over the keys, and felt it burn a little brighter. “Do you hear me? I’m not falling for this Scooby-Doo shit! I’m here, this house belongs to _me_ now, and you can’t scare me away!”

From somewhere in the darkness past the stairs, there was a _bang_ , like someone had slammed the cover abruptly over the piano’s keys, or kicked over its bench as they flew to their feet. With a discordant jangle, the music cut sharply off.

Laura stood perfectly still, listening, her fingers going stiff from how tightly she was clutching the flashlight, not daring to so much as breathe. The house was silent again, and perfectly still under its muffling layers of clay and dust, but there was something different about it. Something vital, active, wakeful – and watchful - that had been missing when Laura had first entered. Even the wind had died back to a low, throaty moan in the background, as though it didn’t dare disturb the silence.

As if the whole house was holding its breath.

Right on cue, Laura’s flashlight flickered, dimmed, then went out.

“Oh, come _on_ ,” she muttered, thumping its end against her palm, frantically clicking the switch back and forth, banging it against her leg. It flickered on once, for the barest sliver of a second, and then died again. The dark of the hall seemed suddenly as thick and viscous as the clay that squelched under Laura’s boots, pouring slowly but inevitably in around her to drag her gently but inexorably under, stop up her mouth, suffocate her slowly. “Come on come on come _on -_ ”

She had the flashlight raised to her face, peering in at its deadened reflective eye, when it suddenly burst back into brilliant light. Laura looked up, away from the blinding glare –

And directly into the twisted, wrathful, silent scream of a skeletal face the barest inch from her own.

Laura screamed, too, the sound of it ringing off the walls, and stumbled backwards. She barely managed not to drop the flashlight, but that didn’t make anything better. It only meant that she could see the clawed hands of the apparition as it grabbed for her, its fingers tearing at the sleeve of her windbreaker. It seemed to be shaped from solidified darkness, part woman, part skeleton, all horror. And its grip was like ice, like iron. Laura tried to pull her arm free, but she might as well have been trying to pull Allerdale Hall itself from its grave in the sucking ground.

The creature – ghost – _whatever_ – ignored Laura’s struggling, drawing her left hand up towards its empty-socketed eyes. It seemed to stare, eyelessly, for a long moment, at Laura’s bare ring finger, before pushing her away with a gesture of disgust. There was an inexorable strength in the motion, and Laura found herself spinning across the floor, unable to catch her balance before she slammed down against the hardwood, catching the point of her elbow with a hiss of pain.

The ghost was on her as soon as she hit the floor. It leaned low over her, shoving its twisted face into her face again, what remained of its lips curled into something part sneer, part rictus. For the briefest of instants, with the clarity that comes with sheer terror, Laura had the slightly crazy thought that, in life, the ghost must have once been very beautiful.

Its voice was a whispering, rasping, rattling hiss that was somehow, also, heavy with contempt.

“ _Liar._ ”

It straightened, enough for Laura to get a glimpse of the flashlight glittering off the beetle-back embellishments of an old-fashioned dress, its train melting into the darkness that surrounded it. The ghost waved a hand in Laura’s direction dismissively, and Laura watched, fascinated with horror, as sparse flesh withered down to charcoal bone before her very eyes.

“ _Get out._ ”

Then the ghost turned its back on Laura, and was swallowed up in the darkness.

Laura didn’t wait for it to come back. She scrambled to her feet, slipping in the clay and falling back to one knee before she got her feet under her.

She wasn’t sure, at first, what she was hearing. It sounded like a distant roaring, like the largest whirlpool she could ever have imagined, like a wave breaking against the shore. Laura paused, curiosity overriding fear for one fragile second, and turned her flashlight back towards the dark space under the stairs.

Just in time to see it collapsing into the ground.

Walls groaned as they fell in towards each other, toppling with a thunderous _crash_ , a _crash_ that went on and on as rooms fell in on the rooms that had fallen in before. The balcony overhead caved in on itself, delicate embellishments snapping and popping away. The stairs gave an ominous moan and _twisted_ , the railing splintering, masonry raining down and punching straight through the floorboards. The floor itself began to unravel around those pockmarks, slender inlaid board by slender inlaid board, to reveal glimpses down into a basement glistening red with clay, far below the growing hole quickly chewing up the suddenly-wobbling floor beneath Laura’s feet. Overhead, a long, drawn-out sigh of wood and brick and stone under stress rose from the broken roof, slivers and splinters pattering down on Laura’s head and rattling down towards the distant floor of the basement below. The walls to either side of her heaved and bowed as though they were breathing.

Laura turned and ran, full tilt, for the door, even as the floor splintered away under her feet. 

She barely made it out, breath half-sobbing with exertion and fear, throat raw, before the deafening roar of Allerdale Hall’s demise rose to a crescendo. With one final crash that shook the ground under Laura’s feet and sounded like it was splitting the sky in two, the remaining walls sheared away from the façade and went tumbling down, carrying its ghost with it, into oblivion.

The door slammed, like the period on the end of a sentence, on Laura’s heels.

…

“You almost make it sound,” Tom said, with the faintest glimmerings of a smile that Laura knew meant he didn’t believe her, “as though the house itself were the ghost.”

Laura sipped at the mug of tea he’d made her. She was still a little surprised that he’d even let her in after she’d shown up, covered in clay and nearly hysterical, at his door in the middle of the night. She’d been too scared to go back to the bed and breakfast alone, and willing to eat a little humble pie in exchange for the sound of a real human voice.

Thankfully, Tom hadn’t laughed. He’d taken one look and invited Laura in, regardless of the late hour, dug her up a robe, and invited her to take a shower while he ran her clothes through the wash. Nearly an hour later, Laura was clean and dry and warm, and starting to feel a little calmer. The tea was definitely helping.

Unfortunately, now that the immediate terror had ebbed, Laura was starting to have to think about it.

Between the ripples and the steam rising off of the tea’s ruddy surface, for a moment, Laura hardly recognized her own reflection. The face looking back up at her from her mug looked like someone – younger, maybe, but also somehow older, or maybe just someone who had been through more than Laura ever had. Wider-eyed, with loose blonde curls falling to frame the heart shape of her sweet face, a stray tea leaf cutting a sharp, ugly gash across one pale cheek –

Laura blew on the tea to cool it, and the illusion vanished.

“You know,” she heard her own voice saying, as if from very far away, “I almost think it was.”


End file.
